Overview

To begin building your website, the first thing that you must do is to find a good web editor. You can choose a commercial one. However, before you make that decision, you should take a look at the free web editors first. Free web editors are not necessarily inferior to the commercial ones.

In the following section, you can find 2 types of web page editors/HTML editors/website builders: WYSIWYG ones and text-based ones. In case you do not know, WYSIWYG means "what you see is what you get". Using a WYSIWYG editor is similar to using a word processor. You type some words or insert some images on the web page and you can immediately see what it will look like in a web browser. In fact, most word processors are also web page editors, since they allow you to save your document in HTML format. Many WYSIWYG editors bundle a number of web page templates with different themes. You can start with one of the templates, add your own images and graphics, modify the background color or text color, etc, and a website with a unique style will come out.

The other types of web page editors are text-based. They are usually optimized for one or more of the programming languages or scripts for the web: Java, JavaScript, JSP, ASP, VBScript, PHP, Perl, CSS, HTML, etc. Features like syntax highlighting and ready-to-use scripts makes it easier for you to code web pages. These editors are best suit for those who want total control over their web pages.

Hyperlinks to some free web page editors, HTML editors and website builders are listed below. The links are for reference only.

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
The following links will direct you to third-party web sites that are not under our control. Please be aware that downloading should be done with caution and make sure your anti-virus software is up to date and is working correctly.

Free WYSIWYG Web Page Editors / Website Builders

Mozilla
Mozilla is the famous free, open source web browser. You can consider it as the up-to-date version of Netscape. The Mozilla web browser package contains a WYSIWYG web page editor, Mozilla Composer, which allows you to write web pages.

OpenOffice
OpenOffice is the famous free, open source office suite that is an alternative to Microsoft Office. It allows you to write web pages using a word processor like GUI. It comes with a number of website templates that you can start with. It also contains a number of images and sounds in its gallery that you can use in your web pages. However, some people complain that OpenOffice may mess up the HTML code that you add manually.

Amaya
Amaya is a free, open source project managed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It supports HTML 4.01, HTTP 1.1, CSS and many CSS 2 features. It also supports XML and an increasing number of XML applications such as the XHTML family, MathML, and SVG (transformation, transparency, and SMIL animation on OpenGL platforms). GTK and OpenGL versions are available.

Free Text-based Web Page Editors / HTML Editors

Bluefish
Another free web page editor with a very high reputation among the open source community. Bluefish is an open source web page editor that runs on POSIX compatible operating systems, including Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS-X, OpenBSD, Solaris and Tru64. Just like Quanta Plus, there is no Win32 version available. Bluefish provides good wizards for creating new web pages, frames, tables, etc. One very good feature is that it can link a thumbnail with its original image automatically. This allows you to create photo albums or screenshot pages easily.

Screem
Screem is an open source, text-based, free HTML editor. It is developed with the GNOME Desktop Environment in mind. It supports the CVS version control tool to help keep track of changes. So, website development with multiple developers can become easier. Its link-fixing feature is very useful. For example, if you move some files within Screem, Screem will automatically update the links within the moved files and the links pointed to the moved files. Another good feature is that its "link view" can help web developers to check whether any broken link exists. A bad news to MS Windows users is that no Win32 version is available for Screem.

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